I am trying to remember if I’ve ever gotten anything in life on account of being nice to people. I don’t think I have. Just an observation.

At a midtown POPS, having walked here from AsLIC. I was at this POPS a couple of weeks ago, I think.

Nothing to say. I’ve been trying to explain myself to people, but not doing a very good job. Feeling antsy and impatient, like a vacuum is opening from the bottom of my life.

It is 3:11pm.

Now it is 3:21pm. Nothing of substance has happened in the last 10 minutes.

I am going to go out walking again, I think.
There are 5 other people here that I can see. An older looking woman  who is writing by hand onto a piece of paper. She seems very concentrated in her activities. A man and a woman are sitting at another table, eating and reading, both in their distinct spaces but still together. I envy those kind of relationships, where two people are comfortable enough together that conversation is not necessary. A 50-ish looking Asian man is sipping some kind of beverage through a stra and reading from what looks like a Korean language newspaper. The security guard, a black woman probably in her 40s, is standing by the piano, which is locked and covered with a cloth fabric thing. Oh and there is one other person I can barely see now but who was at the bottom of the escalator when I came down here. Looks homeless and bored.

There was a block party at the Windmill Garden yesterday. I did not stop in. Everybody looked like assholes.

…

I left this POPS but quickly returned when it started to rain. I don’t think this rain will last. I am in the upstairs part of this POPS, where I appear to have the entire floor to myself. Not even a security guard as far as I can tell. This is across the street from the Lipstick Building, where Bernie Madoff worked his magic. I heard about him yeterday. Apparently people who invested with him and lost money before he started his Ponzi scheme are trying to claw back some of that money, even though Madoff was said to have been legitimate for the first many years of his career.

I knew someone who worked on set designs for the Robert DeNiro movie about Madoff. She knew the story about his scam as well as anybody, and seemed to agree with me that his sons simply did not know about the scam. Madoff could have gotten away with it, I think, simply by never leaving that little room he had at the brokerage across the street.

I also start to think sometimes that the significance of that scandal was blown vastly out of proportion by media and analysts. Today it seems that a significant perentage of the money lost has been recovered.

It looks like the rain held off. Back into the world.

…

Sitting at Grand Central, in the lower level. The Oyster Bar Saloon is here but it is closed on Sundays. As much as I love that space it is lacking in some ways. Very pedestrian beer list, sometimes it is pretty stuffy at the bar, and for me at least there seems to be zero cell phone signal.

Last week, whilst wandering up Ditmars way, I thought I’d worked up the nerve to get a beer at GUSSY’s, a place I’ve never been inside of but I’ve walked past it a bunch of times. Long ago it was called the 29th Street Pub. All I know of the place is that it is or used to be a police hangout. This might be confirmed if my memory is correct that I saw Eddie, Veronica’s husband, standing outside the place one of the many times I passed it by. He is a retired cop. Besides him I don’t know anyone who’s ever mentioned the place or who has been there. It looks like a place that would have a payphone lurking somewhere inside.

But the place was closed. This had me asking, what kind of a bar is closed on Sundays? Is it a church bar? Then I found something somewhere on that Internet thing that said they only open from 1pm-7pm weekdays, and close Sundays. Strange hours for a strange bar.

Since then I’ve noticed that a number of bars close on Sundays. The Oyster Bar Saloon, of course, but I dismissed that as quite exceptional. The bar on Crescent Street near Queensboro Plaza closes on Sundays. It’s a location thing, I guess.

This is great information.

I need to get outta here. Not sure if I’ll walk all the way back to AsLIC but hey, why not… Have eaten basically nothing today.